Ernste Gesänge

Stéphane Degout

Conceived to comfort his friend Clara Schumann, who was at death’s door at the time, Johannes Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge (1896) draw on the Bible and yet are a profoundly secular ode to hope. Clara Schumann also inspired Liederkreis, Op. 24 (1840), in which the man who was to become her husband a few months later set to music nine poems by Heinrich Heine. 

Baritone Stéphane Degout, a regular on our stage, will lend his voice to these lieder typical of German Romanticism in a recital with pianist Alain Planès. In this year commemorating the centennial of the death of Gabriel Fauré, Degout will also perform L’Horizon chimérique (1921), the composer’s last song cycle, written to post-Romantic poems by Jean de La Ville de Mirmont. Lastly, echoing the atmosphere painted by Brahms, melodies by Henri Duparc will round off this programme, with sounds as solemn as they are luminous and optimistic.